According to the American Psychological Association, the average amount of time spent on social media for a teenager is 4.8 hours per day.

In a day and age where our worlds are all online, it begs the question of whether or not we rely on it too much. Have we lost our touch with reality? Have we lost the ability to communicate with one another?

With the reliance on social media platforms as a means of communication, there has been a rise in lack of physical communication among people. In a study done in China where they took a sample of college students across seven different schools, they found that mindlessly scrolling—or “doomscrolling”—was increasing social anxiety in these students.

As a result, these students’ lack of face-to-face interactions decreased their opportunities to actually communicate with each other, making them merely observers of others’ lives rather than engaged in their own.

“I get really anxious starting a conversation when I’m alone,” said student Akira Gordon (‘26). “Social media has definitely made it harder…I’m so used to interacting with people online and not having to be fully social. Then, when I’m in person, it’s like, ‘Wait, I actually have to talk.”

The stigma around social media has changed society as well; the creation of private stories brings exclusion, leaving someone on “delivered” for a prolonged period of time increases overthinking, and the list goes on. These small acts, intentional or not, have brought fights among friends and made social situations variably harder to interpret through a screen.

“Online, it’s easier to get upset over small things, like if someone doesn’t post you or doesn’t like your post, or leaves you off their private story. It shouldn’t matter, but it does,” said Gordon.

This ties back to the central issue that social media hasn’t changed exactly how we communicate, but rather how we understand communication.

We’ve become so comfortable sitting behind a screen that verbal communication now feels almost foreign. In person, there are no three dots to buy you time before you speak, or “undo send” button, and for a generation that was raised on relying on a ‘like’ on an Instagram post to consider someone a friend, it can be overwhelming.

So maybe social media hasn’t completely replaced the way we communicate, but it has definitely made us forget how to use our voices.